The FCC, Open Source & Spectrum Policy... AKA The Ostrich Squawks! (And Then Buries its Head Even Further)

A bunch of folks have e-mailed me recently regarding the recent FCC ruling on "Cognitive Radio Technologies and Software Defined Radios". The ruling has been making the rounds and I've just now had a chance to read through the actual FCC document. All in all, this final rule demonstrates a continuing and remarkable ignorance regarding SD and cognitive radio technology and open source development on the part of the FCC.

I first started talking with the FCC regarding these issues a few years back. For those who are just getting their feet wet on this issue, I'd recommend taking a look at my posting from two years back, "The Coming (Cognitive) Radio Revolution... AKA The FCC as Regulatory Ostrich." The issues I discussed in 2005 are eerily prescient of the FCC's recent ruling.

Unfortunately, this most recent FCC statement completely ignores the fundamental issue that SDRs cannot be stopped or controlled at the supplier/manufacturer any more than the FCC can stop file-sharing, P2P networking, or micro-broadcasting. People aren't going to seek FCC licensure for their software patches (such thinking demonstrates an amazing naïveté for the FOSS [Free Open Source Software] arena). In fact, this recent ruling all but guarantees that Open Source software developers will have less interaction with the FCC because the agency is dramatically increasing the "annoyance threshold" for independent developers to work with them. Even more importantly, most of the SDR development that the FCC is asserting control over is going to be happening outside of the US, and thus outside the FCC's jurisdiction in the first place. In other words, this ruling assumes an Amerocentrism to open source development that doesn't even exist.

In 2005 I said I expected widespread availability in 5-10 years. Today we're already beginning to see the first wave of SD and cognitive radio technologies. The price points for hardware are dropping rapidly (in fact, even faster than I'd anticipated), and development and deployment of wireless technologies is accelerating at an incredible pace. The FCC still has an opportunity to set aside wide swaths of spectrum for SDR and cognitive radio use and alleviate this looming crisis. However, their continuing failure to act in any meaningful way and the obvious ignorance that this ruling demonstrates regarding the open source community generally, makes me wonder if they've fallen so far out of touch with realities on the ground that they think they can simply ignore the problem or will it out of existence.

I remember when Harold Feld and I went in and spoke with FCC staff about mesh wireless technology a couple years ago. I'd brought up the issue that mesh networks (and community networks generally) needed to be addressed in their rules and regulations (and in CALEA, in particular). The staff responded by saying that mesh was not really a major concern because it didn't exist yet, and nothing I said seemed to impact that assessment. So the next time we went in, I brought a backpack full of CUWiN equipment and, in 20 minutes, set up a working mesh wireless network inside the FCC building. Only with this technology fully deployed and operational in their own building did they begin to take the issue seriously. Remarkably, CALEA has remained completely unchanged by the on the ground realities of distributed (mesh) broadband networks and today things are quite a mess because of the FCC's refusal to address technological realities.

In the end, the FCC should not be making rulings on issues they clearly do not understand. And the FCC clearly does not understand (as an organization) the realities of SDR and cognitive radio technologies (even though a number of individual staffers clearly do). As spectrum policy and open source software development continue to collide, it would be far wiser for the FCC to initiate dialog with the open source community, come to terms with the technological changes that make current spectrum licensure obsolete, and formulate solutions that parallel the realities of software defined and cognitive radio technologies. I'd like to see the FCC actually address the concerns I and many others have been raising with them for the past several years. Instead they seem to be burying their head even further into the sand.